Did you know? How books get added to Hester Memorial Library
New books have been added to the Hester Memorial Library collection.
Photo by Danielle Bates
Danielle Bates, Staff Writer
Every Spring semester, the library puts new books the shelves.
How do they get there? Why some, not others? Who decides?
Interestingly, not all of the books are ones never seen on the shelves. Leslie Brown, a reference Librarian in the Hester Library said some of the books are replacements.
“We tend to lose many books from our science selection. I once had a student who had graduated six or seven years before he realized he had carried a book from the library. He called saying he had recently moved and just found the book in a box he hadn’t looked in. Brown said he then returned the book.
While the librarians can’t read everything, Brown has read the “Twilight” series and “The Hunger Games” because “students read these and I need to be able to talk intelligently about them.”
Lisa Hagin, another librarian said “there are a lot of education majors who use the books and the books need to be the latest literature.” Many of the books are requested by faculty for specific classes or departments.
The library is open to the community, hence the large selection of young adult literature and adolescent literature.
There is quite a process to getting the books on the shelves. Hagin said that the books go through a ‘screening process’. They must first be catalogued according to the Library of Congress Classification System.
They are then prepared for the shelves. Each one is stamped with the “North Greenville University” red ink stamp. If any need to be laminated it is done so.
“The process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year” Hagin said. It just depends on how many books they have to go through, but the process has become more streamlined in recent years and takes less time.
